Today we launch a Manifesto: Towards
E-Quality in Networked E-Learning in Higher Education on the basis
of our shared deliberation, practitioner research and collective
experience. Our vision is of a higher education where access and
connectivity are encouraged and where lifelong learning is truly
and effectively supported.

The Manifesto will be of value to policy
makers, practitioners and the research community. Our intention is
to assist with the development of policy on e-learning and to
stimulate debate about current practice.

This Manifesto is now offered to the higher
education community for debate and further development. We welcome
your comments.

This Seminar Series has involved researchers
and practitioners from Coventry University, Glasgow University,
Lancaster University and the University of Sheffield, as well as
invited guests from other institutions from both within and
outside the UK. As the title suggests, our focus has been on the
implications of the use of networked learning for Higher
Education. The series has aimed to stimulate debate through the
critical examination of relevant literature, current practice, and
studies of teachers' and learners' experiences of networked
learning. We have addressed three themes throughout the seminar
series:

Understanding the learner's and
teacher's experience of networked learning

Theorising the nature and status of
knowledge, learning and identity in networked learning and
relating this to the design, organisation and assessment of
networked learning courses and programmes.

Examining the implications of networked
learning for restructuring education and changing the role of
the teacher/tutor, with a special focus on institutional
readiness and the management of change.

Working Towards E-Quality in Networked
E-Learning in Higher Education: A Manifesto Statement for
Debate.

The participants of the ESRC Seminar Series
The Implications of Networked Learning for Higher Education (March
2000 - March 2002), assert that the opportunities provided by
networked e-learning to enhance and add value to our practices
must be refocused, or we risk an impoverished quality of higher
educational experience.

This manifesto presents a vision of
e-quality in networked e-learning based on our shared
deliberation, practitioner research and collective experience. The
vision is of a higher education where access and connection are
championed and where lifelong learning is truly and effectively
supported.

Preamble

There has been an explosion in access to
knowledge and information as part of the development of the
Internet and the World Wide Web. Private and commercial interests
have accompanied this proliferation of digital resources, which
provide ever-increasing possibilities for interaction and
communication across the globe. Some commentators see this as a
threat to traditional educational institutions. Others see it as
offering viable alternatives to the ivory tower with the potential
to realise the ideas of various influential educators and
educational thinkers such as Dewey, Vygotsky and
Illich.

The advent of new ICT and the WWW has also
encouraged new thinking by educational institutions including the
view that open and distance learning is no longer primarily the
province of specialist institutions. Increasingly, higher
education institutions are looking at how new technology can
support open and distance learning for their existing students and
for potential new markets.

Much of the current political interest in
lifelong learning may be a reaction and response to the so-called
transition from the Industrialised Society to the Information
Society (Castells, 1997).

Although one can argue that technology does
not determine educational processes, it is equally difficult for
educational institutions to script the impact that technology will
have upon education practice and learning processes. Many
commentators are, therefore, raising questions about the adequacy
of current models and approaches to higher education.

The increased capacity for global
communication, together with easy access to information rich
repositories accessible via the Internet and/or WWW has led some
educationalists to suggest that we need to change our teaching and
learning approaches. We need, they claim, to move from a
predominantly instructional paradigm of teaching and learning to a
more constructionist one. Seymour Papert has, for example,
discussed at length the inherent complexity and rapidly changing
nature of society as it becomes ever more digitalised and
knowledge based. He claims that current education provision is
based on an industrialised model of society. He believes this
model of education no longer reflects the complex and constantly
changing world that we now live in. He describes it as a
production-line organisation of the product of school and argues
that the idea of the linear curriculum is a manifestation of this.
Papert argues that the new avenues of learning opened up by
digital technology will oblige us to give up such a linear
curriculum and the dissemination of knowledge (Papert, 1998).
Papert is referring mostly to schools but his comments are, we
would suggest, equally relevant to higher education.

Recent commentators on higher education
argue for the importance of its role in contributing to democratic
society (for example, Barnett, 1997; Delanty, 2001).

Such a view of the purpose of higher
education suggests that its prime educational task is to foster
active engagement in the pursuit of independent and lifelong
learning, characterized by scholarship, inquiry, dialogue,
problem-solving, creativity, criticality and collegiality, in an
area of disciplinary discourse.

It follows that this purpose is best
achieved not through a pedagogy based solely on delivery of
information - however skillfully that information may be packaged.
It is best achieved through a pedagogy based on constructionist
views of knowledge which requires students to engage with ideas
and develop skills and capabilities within a scholarly community
where knowledge is actively constructed and framed as provisional,
and where future learning through research is an aspiration.

This view of the purpose of higher education
as a contribution to the maintenance and development of democratic
processes, alongside the change in models of curriculum required
by the shift from the Industrialised Society to the Information
Society, both suggest a key role for Networked
E-Learning.

The way we use technology to support and/or
provide learning environments reflects the educational assumptions
and philosophy underlying design and has implications for the
quality of the student learning experience.

There is little doubt that e-learning can
develop in versions that impoverish, as well as those that
enhance, educational provision. Some early versions of
computer-assisted learning were little more than programmed
learning technology driven by the machine. In the same way a
limited vision of e-learning sees it as a means of achieving
economies of scale in the delivery of conventionally constructed
course materials. This view, which implies the need for little
more than an industrial scale instructional technology, would
surely be a mistake, although it appears to be the starting point
of some cost/benefit analysts. Our approach begins at a different
point, with an analysis and appraisal of what is afforded and what
is constrained by the new e-technology.

We believe that the technology used to
support networked e-learning affords two significant capabilities:

1) Its ability to support
distributed collaborative interaction and dialogue

2) Its ability to support access to
information rich resources.

These two capabilities have so far, in our
opinion, been considered unequally. Where only one of these is
concentrated on alone, we believe this will lead to the
impoverishment of the higher education experience. The academy is
above all else a community of scholars. It is not a repository of
information. The phrase 'Networked E-Learning' contains the
conjunction of these two assets, offering a quality learning
environment where connectivity and process is as valuable as the
substance and focus of the connection.

In offering this manifesto we want to
rebalance the debate on e-learning. We want the current dominant
focus on information rich resources to shift towards greater
attention to the processes which support interaction and dialogue.
This re-balancing will provide a closer alignment of the
possibilities offered by e-learning with the aims of higher
education. It offers the perspective of learners collaborating to
reconstruct and refine knowledge for their own purposes in a
global community where everyone has a voice. It profoundly rejects
the view that there is one right view which dominates and
champions a creative culture of academic freedom which for the
first time is multicultural and shared.

On the basis of our experience, practice,
research and ongoing discussions, we propose the following
manifesto for the practice of networked learning in higher
education. In the spirit of our seminar series, we offer this as a
contribution to thinking and practice in this area, and invite
your views, comments and responses to it.

The Manifesto

1. A working definition of Networked
E-Learning:

Networked e-learning refers to those
learning situations and contexts which, through the use of ICT,
allow learners to be connected with other people (for example,
learners, teachers/tutors, mentors, librarians, technical
assistants) and with shared, information rich resources. Networked
e-learning also views learners as contributing to the development
of these learning resources and information of various kinds and
types.

2. Learning, teaching and
assessment

Networked e-learning as envisaged in this
manifesto requires models of learning that are based on
participation and not ones that are based on
transmission.

This requires as much emphasis on learning
processes and learning to learn as on subject
knowledge.

Educational values which contribute to
quality in learning and teaching environments are those that seek
to encourage dialogue, exchange of ideas, intrinsic approaches to
study and engagement. It is this that we need to support through
networked e-learning.

Networked e-learning provides the
opportunity for developing innovative assessment practices in
which teachers and learners collaborate in the assessment process.

Networked e-learning is not a
depersonalising experience. The careful integration of course
design and innovative assessment can create as intimate an
educational experience as a face-to-face encounter.

3. Changing the relationship between
teachers and learners

In our view of networked e-learning, the
relationship between teachers and learners is based on
collaboration and co-construction of knowledge rather than on that
of expert and acolyte. Such a view of the relationship between
learners and teachers is one that is supported by the idea of the
learning community. Networked e-learning can contribute to the
establishment of virtual learning communities and enhance existing
face-to-face learning communities.

The implementation of rich forms of
networked e-learning also requires support for and the
legitimisation of work done by academics towards the sharing of
practice through both case study accounts and networks of
practice.

If networked e-learning is to become a rich
and robust educational practice providing quality learning
environments, practitioners need to engage in critical and
reflexive evaluation of their own practice. Any shift in tutor
role as proposed here needs to be supported through professional
development. Such professional development should mirror and be
consistent with the principles underlying networked
e-learning.

4. Supporting democratic processes,
diversity and inclusion

Networked e-learning has significant
potential for widening access and participation in higher
education and for promoting social inclusion.

Networked e-learning allows for the
possibility of new forms of communication, language and discourse.
Such new forms of communication have the potential to be more open
and supportive of inclusive educational practices. It promotes use
of a wider range of resources, both material and human, directly
relevant to learners' own intentions and interests. It offers the
potential for dialogue with a broader range of people and in a
form which allows different styles and preferences to be
supported.

Potentially peer learning can be supported
in a way which fosters inclusion and democracy in a learning
community.

It offers opportunities of wider
collaboration between academics, between academics and
professionals, between people across cultures, between learners,
and between learning and those who can support their
learning.

Networked e-learning enables the vision of
non-gate-keeping universities and the facilitation of synergy
between disciplines. It offers a glimpse of a world in which
intellectual property rights with respect to teaching and learning
materials become irrelevant and open to all.

A culture neutral curriculum or design is
impossible. If teachers are to mediate learning they must find
common ground with the learner. Globalisation has the potential to
facilitate movements and dialogues between cultures and shifts in
notions of fixed identity or communities. Networked e-learning
provides the opportunity to examine such issues of difference at
the same time as providing a space in which to engage in the
networked learning culture per se.

5. The need for a networked e-learning
policy.

We believe that policy for networked
e-learning should be based on explicit educational values and
research.

Networked e-learning needs a policy that
recognises changing roles and thus different costing and
resourcing structures. Networked e-learning does not require less
resources - it requires a different blend of resources. It
requires both full technical support as well as curriculum design
support.

Policy for network e-learning should be
based on explicit educational values and constantly reiterated by
reference to research findings, particularly from the various
strategies and methods that have been gathered together under the
rubrics of evaluation and practitioner research. Learners and
tutors should feel free to engage openly with each other in a
collaborative and supportive environment. This raises issues of
privacy, surveillance, individual rights and data protection,
which need to be addressed explicitly by institutional policy, and
agreed locally by all parties.

Final comment

We invite comments and responses on this
Manifesto, which is intended as a contribution to forthcoming
debate.